While I was in medical school, I needed everything outside of school to be easy, I had no patience at all left for cooking, but now that I’m free, I’ve got the time, and the energy, but maybe not the money. I looked back at my expenses and saw that I spent between $700 and $1000+ on food each month between eating out all of the time, picking up snacks from the school “book” (snack) store, and picking up expensive prepared food from health food stores. So, obviously if I need my money to stretch, I thought the biggest way for me to save money while likely still eating better is to start cooking/preparing food from scratch. I’m trying to bring down my average of $25 per day spent on food to $10, maybe less. If I can do that, I can live on what I have for longer, and have more time to recover from school, build my practice, invest in leisure, etc.

While making the inventory, I realized how much food Joy (my partner) and I actually have when we would previously go to the store and buy more food because we were out. I started calling this food ghost food, because its the food that’s there when we “don’t have food”, so its like there but its not. So far I’ve made like 8 meals with ghost food and I’m working on reducing the amount of ghost foods in our freezer and pantry.

Just thought I’d share because I’m excited that I just finished my first self-directed project since getting out of school. I hope to do a lot more things to better my life now that I have the energy to do that.